Google is rolling out a new look for its search pages. The biggest difference is a new left-hand navigation menu that appears by default, with colorful icons for different categories. The menu also displays only the sub-categories and related search tools that Google believes are relevant. Read more »
Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital has bought a stake in Klarna AB, a European payments provider, and Sequoia partner Michael Moritz has joined the company’s board. The amount has not been disclosed, but Sequoia will become the single largest shareholder of the Swedish company. Read more »
Two Congressmen have proposed a sweeping bill to govern online privacy that would require companies to provide clear notices of what information is being collected by either their site or service or a third-party ad network, and would allow users to opt out from such services. Read more »
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Federal authorities are widely believed to be considering an antitrust inquiry of some kind into Apple’s practices regarding development of apps for the iPhone and iPad, with the FTC and the Justice Department discussing a complaint reportedly made by Adobe over Apple’s restrictions on developers. Read more »
One of the founders of Bootup Labs, an incubator that was forced to restructure after failing to raise as much money as it had promised, has said he is leaving the company. Former NowPublic CEO Leonard Brody is also joining the fund in an advisory role. Read more »
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tells Fox Business that the company has sold more than a million iPads because the product is so well-engineered and designed, and that consumers have developed a trust in Apple products that goes beyond the company’s traditional fan base. Read more »
Local news aggregator Topix has rolled out a suite of new features, including a new Twitter service that sends local news to users based on their location, as well as the integration of Facebook’s social plugins on topic pages, and a doubling of the news content. Read more »
Facebook’s new features are designed to extend the network’s “social graph” and connect it to virtually any website. It’s good news for Facebook, but not all agree a single company should control the way recommendations work on the web, and so far, Google appears to be ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Chris Kelly, the former chief privacy officer for Facebook and now a candidate for Attorney General of California, has publicly distanced himself from the social network over its new features, saying he believes that the company should not automatically “opt in” users to new information-sharing services. Read more »
Amazon has launched a new feature for the Kindle that shows the most highlighted passages in its e-books, using data collected from individual users of the device. While some readers seem to like the feature, others see it as a little too Big Brother-ish and creepy. Read more »
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Is there a tablet in Google’s future with a 3-D, multitouch interface? Some think there could be, since it just acquired BumpTop, whose software creates a 3D environment where users can toss their file icons around, stack them in piles and “hang” them on walls. Read more »
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been taking a lot of flak for saying in an interview with the BBC that Google needs to diversify its business, because it is still “99.9 percent search.” But you know what? She’s right. The search giant does need to diversify. Read more »
Opera, the Norwegian browser company that is a perennial runner-up to larger players such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, has bought Australian web-mail company FastMail.fm for an undisclosed sum. Opera says it wants to expand its email service to mobile devices and even interactive televisions. Read more »
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he believes the benefits of taking an open approach to content outweigh the disadvantages, and says that something as large and influential as Wikipedia has become could never have been built unless the process was open to anyone to contribute. Read more »
Taking a cue from Foursquare, the Huffington Post has launched a new feature that awards “badges” to regular readers of the news site, based on how much they connect with other readers and also whether they link their HuffPo accounts with other sites such as Facebook. Read more »
Match.com has sent a strongly worded letter — written by the company’s lawyer — to competitor Plenty of Fish, accusing the free dating service of making unsubstantiated claims about its traffic and the number of users the site has. Read more »
There’s no question location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are hot properties, with Foursquare reportedly the subject of multiple acquisition offers, including one from Yahoo estimated at $100 million. But are these services really standalone businesses, or are they features that belong inside other businesses? Read more »
Harbinger Capital partners has reportedly hired Sanjiv Ahuja, the former chief executive of Orange, the wireless unit of France Telecom, to run its planned Long Term Evolution wireless network. The private equity firm wants to construct a next-generation wireless network using both satellite and terrestrial components. Read more »
Firefox has thrown down the gauntlet in the race to take charge of your online identity, saying it will add identity-management features to its browser, and hopes to build recommendation services into it as well. The move pits the browser’s open-source model against Facebook’s proprietary approach. Read more »
Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through its new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network is sending to anyone whose app or service uses the new feature. Read more »
In the latest salvo of privacy-related criticism to be directed at the social network, a group of four senators have sent a letter to Facebook asking the company to change some of its new information-sharing settings, and to stop enabling its sharing features by default. Read more »
Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are proving to be popular, with Foursquare recently passing 1 million users and rumored to be the subject of a $100 million takeover offer from Yahoo. But are these businesses in and of themselves, or are they features of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the latest in a series of acquisitions of small companies that began last fall, Google has bought a small Israeli startup called LabPixies, which makes casual games and apps for the web and mobile devices. The company makes a number of popular games for iGoogle. Read more »
Gizmodo’s purchase of an iPhone prototype from someone who found it in a bar has led some to criticise the blog’s journalistic methods, and police to raid an editor’s home. Do you think the blog was justified, or should editors face legal charges for their acts? Read more »
The Wall Street Journal has launched a partnership with Foursquare that will show readers links to stories and reviews about local landmarks in New York, and allow them to win special badges. But will this actually help the Journal, or is it just a PR stunt? Read more »
GetGlue has rolled out some new features for its service, which provides users with movie, music and book suggestions from friends in their social network. But can the startup compete with the 400-pound gorilla known as Facebook and its new open graph protocol and social plugins? Read more »
The launch of Facebook’s open graph protocol is fueling the debate over whether it is better to be open vs. closed. But the ultimate answer may be that it depends. Being open can benefit a company in some ways, while being closed is better in others. Read more »
The University of Maryland released a study of college students and the Internet yesterday that garnered some headlines, including one from Reuters that talked about how these poor students were “suffering from Internet addiction.” According to the research quoted by the newswire, they showed “symptoms similar […] Read more »
Facebook wants to extend its social graph throughout the web, via social plugins and a billion “Like” buttons, but not everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. The “Open Like” project is an attempt at an alternative, with an open standard that deserves support. Read more »
Apple’s market cap is edging towards $250 billion, Facebook is being valued at anywhere from $20-$50 billion, game maker Zynga is reportedly worth $5 billion, and VCs are said to be circling startups like Foursquare with offers of $100 million takeouts. Are we inflating another bubble? Read more »
Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary. Since a lot of what the company talked about was introduced in either “developer speak” — involving terms like API […] Read more »
One thing Facebook didn’t introduce at its recent f8 conference — even though it was widely anticipated and predicted — was any kind of location-based features or integration with the social network. So what happened? Were they just not ready, or is there more to it? Read more »
The co-founder of venture fund and incubator Bootup Labs has apologized publicly for the failure of the company’s Y Combinator-style startup camp, which fell apart last week after it failed to raise enough money to back all of the startups it had accepted into the program. Read more »
Facebook announced a series of features at its f8 conference that will allow it to track a user’s behavior and activity as they interact with various websites. Some see this as a good thing, but others are concerned about giving a single company that much power. Read more »
LinkedIn has rolled out some enhancements to its sharing features that allow users to post links and images to the service, features that now look virtually identical to those at Facebook and on Google Buzz. But is copying other social networks going to help LinkedIn grow? Read more »
Hiring at venture-backed startups picked up speed in the first quarter, according to figures released by the National Venture Capital Association and job board StartUpHire.com. A total of 13,314 jobs were posted by startups in the first quarter, up 16 percent since the end of 2009. Read more »
Open vs. Closed. It’s a story that has been at the heart of the technology industry for most of its modern history, and it exposes issues that are crucial to the industry’s evolution, with giant companies on either side of the equation jockeying for position. Read more »
Blogging platform Tumblr has raised another round of financing from its existing venture backers, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, putting pressure on the company to start generating revenue. It is exploring various options, but founder David Karp has said that he is “opposed to advertising.” Read more »
The World Bank, which tracks everything from mortality rates to livestock production in hundreds of countries around the globe, said today it is opening up its data, including removing all of the pay walls around data that used to require a subscription fee to download. Read more »
The recent dust-up between Twitter and its developers is like a real-time instruction manual in managing developer relations — something that any service which hopes to become a broad platform needs to think about. How much of what is core to your business do you control, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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